| In Poetry and the Press in a Time of War (1936--1945) , I explore dilemmas of mediation and representation in texts that treat distant violence. By examining the works that Cesar Vallejo, W.H. Auden, Raymond Queneau, and Wallace Stevens wrote during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, my study unites a set of writers who have not yet been considered together, although they were contemporaries writing about the same wars and engaged with the same problems in their poetry and journalism: the feasibility of the poet's prophetic voice, the meshing of political ideals and religion, and the relation between individual and national community. All four writers were noncombatants, and in thinking about the mediation inherent in receiving news of war, they foreground rhetoric as a crucial yet slippery tool that the poet must wield even as he criticizes its persuasive power in the hands of politicians and pressmen. These writers contend that poetry is capable of shaking the structures of consciousness and convention through its self-reflexivity---a capacity journalism does not have---thereby providing the conditions necessary to alter quotidian modes of perceiving, thinking, and acting. Yet the press as an institution, journalism as a genre, and the formal and figurative dimensions of the newspaper nonetheless provide a repertoire from which these writers draw in order to consider the compositional structures of poetic and journalistic texts alike. In poems that reflect back upon themselves through figures of relation, the writers I study foreground their own processes of mediating distance and, as I show, express the experience of wartime through a heightened self-reflexivity. |
